“Go, then,” his father said. “You’re old enough to make your own mistakes.”
And so he went. He said a terse farewell and made his way to the next town over, where a bus brought him to the gates of St. Columbanus. He often imagined his father sitting, a book in his lap, before the turf fire. His own chair empty. But as bad as things were at the seminary, he would not trade it for his old chair by the fire. Ballyrath was the past. Eileen was the past. At the time, he wasn’t as sure about consigning his father to the long-ago—he still imagined some kind of reunion, if not a reconciliation—but now, as the séance had shown him, that decision had been made for him. That was the news he’d received that rainy morning when he was called out of the classroom. That was the reason for the desolate transit to the small church where he and Francis had sat, side by side, only an arm’s length away from the box containing their father’s body.
MORRISANIA
WHAT WAS THE PROPER way to dress when applying for relief? Was it better to go in rags, to create a picture of desperate poverty that would prick the sympathy of the agent processing your application? Or was it better to go in your Sunday best, dignity intact, even as you admitted to a stranger behind a desk that you could not provide for yourself? Rosemary had opted for Sunday best: a blue dress, a short white jacket, gloves, pearls. The pearls might have been overdoing it, and as she sat on the long bench, the forms in her lap, waiting to hear her name called, she stealthily tucked the strand—a graduation gift from her parents—under her collar. She didn’t know if this was a busier than usual day at the relief office or if the place was always this crowded. She had waited in line for an hour just to get inside and that had been the worst part so far. The standing she could manage; what ate at her was the fear of being recognized. Rosemary? What are you doing here? She assumed that everyone in the line would feel the same way, and sure enough there were plenty who studiously avoided catching the eyes of the others. She thought about the men she’d seen in breadlines, and how they had looked stooped to half their height. She’d figured that life had broken them like matchsticks. Now she knew that it wasn’t weariness but shame that caused them to hide their faces.
How then to explain the others in line—men and women both—who chatted like this was some kind of social hour? One woman fanned herself with a copy of the Bronx Home News while her friend rattled on about someone named Jimmy and how if he thought that she was going to put up with that kind of malarkey, well, then, he has another think coming. Two men smoked and talked boxing. One said Joe Louis was washed up, a palooka, ready to call it quits. “Washed up?” the other said. “Why you gotta admit, out here in public, in fronta the whole world, that you don’ know nothin’ about boxing?” A few years ago and Rosemary would have jumped right into that conversation. Her father had been a bantamweight in his younger days and she had grown up with stories of the night he knocked out a bruiser from Far Rockaway in less than a minute. As a girl, she read the sports pages every morning, and for her tenth birthday, her father took her to a boxing match at Madison Square Garden. She could still remember the glare of the overhead lights punching through the haze of sweat and cigarette smoke. The shouting surged as a scrappy flyweight pinned his opponent against the ropes with a flurry of jabs. Later the Garden exploded when a heavyweight landed a sledgehammer right to the head. But nowadays she barely glanced at the sports pages. Martin had little interest in sports—or sport, as he called it, in his funny Irish way—and the other mothers she knew wouldn’t recognize Joe DiMaggio in a police lineup, and couldn’t tell you who the heavyweight champion was if you offered them five dollars to do it.
Once Rosemary was inside, she gave her name and was handed a number, just as if she were at the bakery. She tried to imagine what it would sound like if they called out her old name, Rosemary Dwyer, and it was too terrible to contemplate. The Dwyers didn’t go on relief. They helped out the unfortunate—found them jobs with the borough, connected them to the few people hiring these days—and they felt good about doing it. Public service, after all. But a Dwyer on the receiving end of a handout? Never. At least she had found an office far from Woodlawn, and far enough from her own apartment that she was unlikely to run into any neighbors. She hadn’t even told Angela Videtti why she was going out, only that she needed her to watch the girls for an hour or two. Rosemary could hardly imagine the stories Angela would tell—dressed up nice, and twice in one week?—or the size of the favors Angela would call in as compensation.
At least the name on the forms would be Dempsey, and there were no Dempsey relatives to mortify—other than Martin. He had his pride, and he would have refused to let her come here, which was why she didn’t tell him. Four years married and here she was, keeping secrets. But what was she supposed to do? He had lost his mind, quitting his job, and all he could offer her was a secret plan that would make it all better. In the meantime there were two little girls who needed to eat and have cozy beds where parents could tell them a story and tuck them in at night. That part seemed to have slipped his mind. She believed that he would come to his senses, but unless she could find a way to bring in some money, what would be left when he finally came around?
She thought again of the waitress at Driscoll’s—she could do that; she could work all day without a word of complaint—and she thought again of Peggy. Everything came so easy to Peggy. Even asking for things was easy for her. She felt no guilt in stretching out her hand, perhaps because she believed that she deserved whatever came her way. Why not ask Daddy for a few dollars to bring her friends to the movies, and why not compel their mother to buy her a new pair of shoes? She wanted to go to the movies. She wanted a new pair of shoes. End of story.